-first edit pass bookmark: "I got a chance to talk to"
-
-pt. 3 edit tier—
-_ footnote on the bad-faith condition on "My Price for Joining"
-_ "it might matter timelessly" → there are people with AI chops who are PC (/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/)
-_ confusing people and ourselves about what the exact crime is
-_ footnote explaining quibbles on clarification
-_ FTX validated Ben's view of EA!! ("systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done")
-_ "your failure to model social reality is believing people when they claim noble motives"
-_ hint at Vanessa being trans
-_ quote Jack on timelines anxiety
-_ do I have a better identifier than "Vassarite"?
-_ maybe I do want to fill in a few more details about the Sasha disaster, conditional on what I end up writing regarding Scott's prosecution?—and conditional on my separate retro email—also the Zolpidem thing
-_ link to protest flyer
-_ "it was the same thing here"—most readers are not going to understand what I see as the obvious analogy
-_ better explanation of MOPs in "Social Reality" scuffle
-_ better context on "scam" &c. earlier
-_ mention that I was miffed about "Boundaries?" not getting Curated, while one of Euk's animal posts did
-_ establish usage of "coordination group" vs. "posse"?
-_ LessWrong vs. GreaterWrong for comment links?
-_ cut words from descriptions of other posts! (if people want to read them, they can click through ... but on review, these descriptions seem pretty reasonable?)
-_ try to clarify Abram's categories view (Michael didn't get it) (but it still seems clear to me on re-read?)
-_ explicitly mention http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bad-faith-behavior-not-feeling/
-_ meeting with Ray (maybe?)
-_ friends with someone on an animal level, like with a dog
-_ "Density in Thingspace" comment (maybe a footnote in the § explaining the background to "Unnatural Categories")
-
-pt. 4 edit tier—
-_ body odors comment
-_ mention Nick Bostrom email scandal (and his not appearing on the one-sentence CAIS statement)
-_ if he wanted to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences (I should explain)
-_ emphasize that 2018 thread was policing TERF-like pronoun usage, not just disapproving of gender-based pronouns
-_ if you only say good things about Republican candidates
-_ to-be-continued ending about how being a fraud might be a good idea
-_ cite more sneers; use a footnote to pack in as many as possible
-_ Litany Against Gurus, not sure humans can think and trust at the same time; High Status and Stupidity
-_ honesty and humility, HEXACO
+_ comment to lc
+_ bully Jeff Ladish
+_ finish pt. 5
+_ address auto edit tier to pt. 5
+_ solicit red team pt. 5
+_ solicit pro edit pt. 5
+_ apply red team pt. 5
+_ apply pro edit pt. 5
+
+✓ consult Tail
+
+_ consult David Xu
+_ psychiatric disaster private doc
pt. 5 edit tier—
+✓ sucking Scott's dick is helpful because he's now the main gateway instead of HPMOR
_ Previously-on summary
_ graf about Christiano could use a rewrite
_ Dolphin War: after "never been published", insert "still citing it" graf
_ Dolphin War: simplify sentence structure around "by cherry-picking the features"
+_ "Density in Thingspace" comment in Dolphin War https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary
_ quote specific exchange where I mentioned 10,000 words of philosophy that Scott was wrong—obviously the wrong play
_ Meghan Murphy got it down to four words
_ Dolphin War needs more Twitter links: "as Soares pointed out" needs link, "threw an eleven-Tweet tantrum" (probably screenshot), tussling
+_ replace anti-black joke with misogynist joke?
_ end of voting conversation needs links
_ can I rewrite to not bury the lede on "intent doesn't matter"?
_ also reference "No such thing as a tree" in Dolphin War section
_ revise reply to Xu
_ cite Earthling/postrat sneers
_ cite postYud Tweet
-_ when EY put a checkmark on my Discord message characterizing his strategy as giving up on intellectual honesty
_ cut lots of words from Scotts comments on Jessica's MIRI post (keep: "attempting to erase the agency", Scott blaming my troubles on Michael being absurd)
-_ sucking Scott's dick is helpful because he's now the main gateway instead of HPMOR
_ Sarah's point that Scott gets a lot of undeserved deference, too: https://twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1435609950303162370
_ clarify that Keltham infers there are no mascochists, vs. Word of God
_ "Doublethink" ref in Xu discussion should mention that Word of God Eliezerfic clarification that it's not about telling others
_ https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vvc2MiZvWgMFaSbhx/book-review-the-bell-curve-by-charles-murray/comment/git7xaE2aHfSZyLzL
-_ cut words from January 2020 Twitter exchange (after war criminal defenses)
_ "Not Man for the Categories" keeps getting cited
_ the hill he wants to die on
_ humans have honor instead of TDT. "That's right! I'm appealing to your honor!"
_ Leeroy Jenkins Option
+_ consult 93 about Jessica's dramapost §
_ historical non-robot-cult rationality wisdom
_ work in the "some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other"
+_ finale: mention that I'm not doing the dumb reversed-stupidity thing
+_ maybe current-year LW would be better if more marginal cases _had_ bounced off because of e.g. sexism
+_ explain the "if the world were at stake" Sword of Good reference better
+_ better explanation of Scott's jailbreaking accusation against Vassar
+_ "Riley" pointing out that it worked better because it was Oli
+_ mention Michael's influence and South Park recs in late 2016?
+_ GreaterWrong over Less Wrong for comment links
+_ "List of Lethalities" mentioning quantilizers + https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1301958048911560704 + https://twitter.com/paulfchristiano/status/1301992757007847425
+_ screenshot Xu thread
+
+
+Vassar et al.—
+✓ "What You Can't Say"
+✓ reached out to Garrison Lovely
+✓ Michael on creepy and crazy men (new)
+✓ Michael's SLAPP against REACH (new)
+✓ elided Sasha disaster (new)
+✓ Ben publish "Discursive Warfare and Faction Formation" doc?
+✓ Yudkowsky thinking reasoning wasn't useful
+✓ Jessica brought up race & IQ (she skimmed the previous draft, so I should highlight), or calling Ruby a MOP
+✓ what should I say to Iceman? https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1730025195413410129
+✓ footnote about FTX
+✓ revision of "yelling" description
-things to discuss with Michael/Ben/Jessica—
-_ Anna on Paul Graham
-_ Yudkowsky thinking reasoning wasn't useful
-_ Jessica brought up race & IQ (she skimmed the previous draft, so I should highlight this)
-_ Michael's SLAPP against REACH (new)
-_ Michael on creepy and crazy men (new)
-_ elided Sasha disaster (new)
pt. 3–5 prereaders—
-_ paid hostile prereader (first choice: April)
_ Iceman
-_ Scott? (cursory notification)
+_ Anna
+_ Said
+_ Joel
_ Kelsey (what was that 1 year statute of limitations about??)
_ Steven Kaas
_ David Xu
_ the reason "truth is better than lies; knowledge is better than ignorance" is general; can assert by authorial fiat whatever details are needed to make it all turn out for the greater good, but _that's not how anything works in real life_.
_ "telling people things would be meddling" moral needs work; obvious objection is that different rules apply to Keepers
_ "obligate" is only Word of God, right?—I should probably cite this
+_ damnatio memoriae is traditionally a punishment
_ examples of snarky comments about "the rationalists"
_ 13th century word meanings
_ weirdly hostile comments on "... Boundaries?"
-_ Anna's claim that Scott was a target specifically because he was good, my counterclaim that payment can't be impunity
-_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
+
+
far editing tier—
_ You cannot comprehend it, I cannot comprehend it
_ screenshot key Tweet threads (now that Twitter requires you to log in)
-_ Caliphate / craft and the community
_ colony ship happiness lie in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AWaJvBMb9HGBwtNqd/qualitative-strategies-of-friendliness
_ re being fair to abusers: thinking about what behavior pattern you would like to see, generally, by people in your situation, instead of privileging the perspective and feelings of people who've made themselves vulnerable to you by transgressing against you
_ worry about hyperbole/jumps-to-evaluation; it destroys credibility
-_ Christmas with Scott: mention the destruction of "voluntary"?
-_ Christmas with Scott: mention the grid of points?
_ dath ilan as a whining-based community
_ footnote to explain that when I'm summarizing a long Discord conversation to taste, I might move things around into "logical" time rather than "real time"; e.g. Yudkowsky's "powerfully relevant" and "but Superman" comments were actually one right after the other; and, e.g., I'm filling in more details that didn't make it into the chat, like innate kung fu; and that the fact that I can "enhance" the summaries of my part, but the people I'm talking to don't have the same privilege, should be taken into account—actually, this covers a lot of the memoir; maybe I should mention this earlier (and again in a footnote??)
_ 93's alternate theory of eliezera taste for deception
-_ Ruby fight: "forces of blandness want me gone ... stand my ground" remark
-_ "Even our pollution is beneficial" [pt. 6]
-_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science [pt. 6]
+_ "Even our pollution is beneficial"
+_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science
_ "EA" brand ate the "rationalism" brand—even visible in MIRI dialogues
_ Anna's heel–face turn
_ not talking about pivotal acts, downstream of not believing in Speech?
_ Alyssa lying about me [pt. 4]
-_ Brian Skyrms??
_ mr-hire and pre-emptive steelmanning (before meeting LW mods)
_ is the Glowfic author "Lintamande ... they" or "Lintamande ... she"?
_ explain plot of _Planecrash_ better
-_ everyone *who matters* prefers to stay on the good side
_ CfAR's AI pivot??
_ example of "steelman before criticize" norm
_ explain mods protect-feelings
-_ explain MOPs better
-_ Motta-Mena and Puts probability-of-gynephilia-by-intersex-condition graph, re trans kids on the margin
-
_ squeeze "Darkness and Light" into the Eliezerfic account
_ somewhere in dath ilan discussion: putting a wrapper on graphic porn is fine, de-listing Wikipedia articles is not
-_ maybe current-year LW would be better if more marginal cases _had_ bounced off because of e.g. sexism
_ re "EY is a fraud": it's a _conditional_ that he can modus tollens if he wants
_ NRx point about HBD being more than IQ, ties in with how I think the focus on IQ is distasteful, but I have political incentives to bring it up
_ "arguing for a duty to self-censorship"—contrast to my "closing thoughts" email
_ fold in observations from "trapped priors—at home"
_ Yudkowsky's "Is someone trolling?" comment as counterevidence to narcissim
-_ "typographical attack surface" isn't clear
-_ voting reputation section is weak, needs revision
-_ incoprorate "downvote Eliezer in their head" remark from Jessica's memoir
-_ explain the "if the world were at stake" Sword of Good reference better
-_ D. also acknowledged AGP
-_ "no one else would have spoken" should have been a call-to-action to read more widely
-_ mention Will MacAskill's gimped "longtermism" somehow
+_ incoprorate "downvote Eliezer in their head" remark from Jessica's memoir
_ re-read a DALL-E explanation and decide if I think it's less scary now
_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6821
_ footnote previous race-IQ baiting on "why do I keep bringing this up"
_ acknowledge that
_ pull "agreeing with Stalin" quote earlier in ms. to argue that Yudkowsky apparently doesn't disagree with my "deliberately ambiguous"
_ is the title of pt. 4 OK? (agreeing with Stalin _is_ correct when Stalin is right; the problem is that Stalin isn't right about gender)
-_ illustrate "student dysphoria is worse" with anecdote about leaving physics class and going to the counselor to see if I could graduate earlier?
-_ hate for secrecy probably correlates with autogynephilia blogging
-_ mention Said rigor check somewhere, nervousness about Michael's gang being a mini-egregore
-_ at some point, speculate on causes of brain damage
-_ the "reducing negativity" post does obliquely hint at the regression point being general ("Let's say that the true level of negativity"), does that seriously undermine my thesis, or does it only merit a footnote?
_ footnote on "no one would even consider"
_ post-Christmas conversation should do a better job of capturing the war, that Jessica thinks Scott is Bad for being a psychiatrist
_ conversation with Scott should include the point where I'm trying to do AI theory
_ consistent-ize reference to Somni getting it in pt. 4, with mention of protest in pt. 3
_ Anna "everyone knows" we don't have free speech 2 Mar 2019, self-centeredness about which global goods matter
-_ make sure to quote Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy before calling back to it
_ tie off Anna's plot arc?
-_ explain earlier that my practice of "throw money at things" also applied to my friendship with Anna
-_ mention my robot cult history (I've been here since the late 'aughts)
_ quote one more "Hill of Meaning" Tweet emphasizing fact/policy distinction
-_ explains that the "cut my dick off rhetoric" came from conversation with Ben
_ being friends with Anna desipite being political enemies (~May 2019)
-_ rephrase "gamete size" discussion to make it clearer that Yudkowsky's proposal also implicitly requires people to be agree about the clustering thing
_ smoother transition between "deliberately ambiguous" and "was playing dumb"; I'm not being paranoid for attributing political motives to him, because he told us that he's doing it
_ when I'm too close to verbatim-quoting someone's email, actually use a verbatim quote and put it in quotes
_ I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences
-_ 2019 Discord discourse with Alicorner
_ edit discussion of "anti-trans" side given that I later emphasize that "sides" shouldn't be a thing
-_ Said on Yudkowsky's retreat to Facebook being bad for him
-_ erasing agency of Michael's friends, construed as a pawn
-_ when to use first _vs. last names
-_ explain Rob
_ edit the child transition section in a way that Kay Brown would be OK with, have a few sentences about Clever Hans before the wrap-up
_ ask Jessica where Scott clarified his position on antipsychotics?
_ why doesn't he apply his anti-optimism to his gender statements?!
_ notice the symmetry where _both_ E and I want to partition the discussion with "That's a policy question" ... I just think it's unfair to partition after "words don't have intrinsic defn's" rather than 37 ways
_ contract-drafting em, SSC blogroll is most of my traffic
-_ "Common Interest of Many Causes" and "Kolmogorov Complicity" offer directly contradictory strategies
_ Vassar's about-face on gender
_ better introduction of S.K.
-_ risk of people bouncing off progressivism
_ an AGP teen boy could at least consent to transition, and make plans based on knowing what the thing is (you'd actually want to go through a little bit of male puberty)
-_ better explanation of Scott's jailbreaking accusation against Vassar
_ archive.is karma history for Jessica's post
-_ "tossed in a bucket" is ignoring advice from Sept. 2022 clarification to be clear about the type distinction
_ figure out full timeline of which of my Less Wrong posts to mention
-_ update "80,000 words" refs with the near-final wordcount
-_ the "outright bad faith" clause in "Your Price for Joining"
-_ "Riley" pointing out that it worked better because it was Oli
-_ I should respond to Ziz's charges that my criticism of concept-policing was a form of concept-policing
-_ mention "special simulator attention" in cxn with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference
_ born five years too early
_ you didn't do a good job explaining to me why someone would think that being bullied into selective silence doesn't constitute a conflict strategy
_ "counterfactual boyfriend"/It's California in the year 2016??
-_ mention Michael's influence and South Park recs in late 2016?
+
_ footnote to explain why I always include the year with the month even though it could be inferred from context
_ update "karma at press time"
_ better explain "lie inflation" ambiguity
_ Facing Reality
-_ backlink condemning Emperor Norton Conspiracy
-_ backlink AGP in women post (time permitting) in pt. 2 "don't think it's the same thing"
-_ backlink "I've decided to drop the pseudonym" to pen name drop post
-_ backlink (/2022/TODO/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/)
-_ backlink "I again refer to" Happy Price
-_ backlink "(again) whether he accepted the Cheerful Price"
-_ backlink "alter the beacon"
-_ backlink only seen an escort once before (#confided-to-)
-_ backlink Yudkowsky's implicit political concession
-_ backlink "again grateful" for doctor's notes
people to consult before publishing, for feedback or right of objection—
_ Iceman
-------
2011
-> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
Men aren't women! Men aren't women tho!
-It's only _after_ people pretended to disagree with _that_, that I started recusively digging into the details—why adult human males on hormone replacement therapy still aren't adult human females, why 'adult human male' and 'adult human female' are natural categories that it makes sense for Meghan McCarthy to want short codewords to point to, how words can be used in different ways depending on context (such that we can understand Meghan McCarthy's claim as it was meant, even if the words _woman_ and _man_ can also be used in other senses), what it means for something to be a natural cateogry, what it means to say that _X_'s aren't _Y_'s ...
+It's only _after_ people pretended to disagree with _that_, that I started recusively digging into the details—why adult human males on hormone replacement therapy still aren't adult human females, why 'adult human male' and 'adult human female' are natural categories that it makes sense for Meghan Murphy to want short codewords to point to, how words can be used in different ways depending on context (such that we can understand Meghan Murphy's claim as it was meant, even if the words _woman_ and _man_ can also be used in other senses), what it means for something to be a natural cateogry, what it means to say that _X_'s aren't _Y_'s ...
It is more than a little insulting to be told, after all this, that the problem is that _I_ don't know how to come to a point, rather than everyone in Berkeley not knowing how to accept a point that contradicts their religion. It's such a stupidly simple stonewalling strategy: when the critic makes their point simply (men aren't women! men aren't women tho!), sneer at them for being ontologically confused, and then when they spend years of their life writing up the exhaustively detailed rigorous version, sneer at them for not being able to come to a point.
------
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
-> I'm not sure that human beings realistically _can_ trust and think at the same time.
"Why Quantum" has another reference to "doesn't seem possible to think and trust"
https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/logical_dt/?l=5gc
It even leaked into Big Yud!!! "Counterfactuals were made for humanity, not humanity for counterfactuals."
+Still citing it (13 Feb 24): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kSq5qiafd6SqQoJWv/technologies-and-terminology-ai-isn-t-software-it-s-deepware
+
+Still citing it (22 Feb 24): https://twitter.com/mlbaggins/status/1760710932047577282
+
At least I don't have to link the rebuttal myself every time:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1553.msg38755.html
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/10vx6gk/the_categories_were_made_for_man_not_man_for_the/j7k8fjc/
+https://twitter.com/niplav_site/status/1744304380503904616
------
> If human nature were not base, but thoroughly honourable, we should in every debate have no other aim than the discovery of truth; we should not in the least care whether the truth proved to be in favour of the opinion which we had begun by expressing, or of the opinion of our adversary.
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ExssKjAaXEEYcnzPd/conversational-cultures-combat-vs-nurture-v2/comment/4qJk3BZ2oQtFskYLh
+William Clifford on "The Ethics of Belief": https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Clifford_ethics.pdf
+
-----
I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
------
-14 November conversation, he put a checkmark emoji on my explanation of why giving up on persuading people via methods that discriminate true or false amounts to giving up on the concept of intellectual honesty and choosing instead to become a propaganda AI, which made me feel much less ragey https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041836374556426350
+14 November 2022 conversation, he put a checkmark emoji on my explanation of why giving up on persuading people via methods that discriminate true or false amounts to giving up on the concept of intellectual honesty and choosing instead to become a propaganda AI, which made me feel much less ragey https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1041836374556426350
The problem isn't just the smugness and condescension; it's the smugness and condescension when he's in the wrong and betraying the principles he laid out in the Sequences and knows it; I don't want to be lumped in with anti-arrogance that's not sensitive to whether the arrogance is in the right
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WijMw9WkcafmCFgj4/do-scientists-already-know-this-stuff/comment/EFg4p7KRbthgH3SnR
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/r5H6YCmnn8DMtBtxt/you-are-a-brain/comment/CsqYAeCPnsAsdQb7d
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QB9eXzzQWBhq9YuB8/rationalizing-and-sitting-bolt-upright-in-alarm/comment/2FfTFrA7iKK6kxqMq
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/8yCXeafJo67tYe5L4/and-all-the-shoggoths-merely-players/comment/AsedCtPfKAef7DdHw
I should have said: _You_ are a product of your time. _Eliezer_ has no integrity. Or rather, he's forgotten that you can't define the word "integrity" any way you want.
Bostrom's apology for an old email—who is this written for?? Why get ahead, when you could just not comment?
-[TODO:
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
-> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)—I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
-
-If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to go out of your way to say positive things about Republican candidates and never, ever say positive things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_—even if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
-
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
-> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
-> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
-
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
-> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
-]
-
the rats were supposed to be an alternative to academic orthodoxy (such that we could just jump to the correct decision theory without the political fighting needing to dethrone CDT), but we're still under the authority of the egregore
(from October 2016 email to Scott)
In October 2016,
-
if [...] wrote her own 10,600 draft Document explaining why she thought [...] is actually a girl, that would be really interesting!—but rather that no one else seemed _interested in having a theory_, as opposed to leaping to institute a social convention that, when challenged, is claimed to have no particular consequences and no particular objective truth conditions, even though it's not clear why there would be moral urgency to implement this convention if it weren't for its consequences.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824 re "malinformation"
-> If we don't have the concept of an attack performed by selectively reporting true information—or, less pleasantly, an attack on the predictable misinferences of people we think less rational than ourselves—the only socially acceptable counter is to say the info is false.
-
I said that I couldn't help but be reminded of a really great short story that I remembered reading back in—it must have been 'aught-nine. I thought it was called "Darkness and Light", or something like that. It was about a guy who gets transported to a fantasy world where he has a magic axe that yells at him sometimes, and he's prophecied to defeat the bad guy, and he and his allies have to defeat these ogres to reach the bad guy's lair. And when they get there, the bad guy _accuses them of murder_ for killing the ogres on the way there.
(The story was actually Yudkowsky's ["The Sword of Good"](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), but I was still enjoying the "Robin Hanson's blog" æsthetic.)
Everyone believed this in 2005! Everyone _still_ believes this!
-
> Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends:
> As a transhumanist and someone with a long, long history of fantasizing about having the property, I am of course strongly in favor of there being social norms and institutions that are carefully designed to help people achieve their lifelong dream of acquiring the property, or rather, the best approximation thereof that is achievable given the marked limitations of existing technology.
> However, it's also kind of important to notice that fantasizing about having the property without having yet sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense! The process of attempting to acquire the property does not propagate backwards in time!
I miss this Yudkowsky—
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why
-> I try in general to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I am high-status, just in case that causes my brain to decide it is no longer necessary. In fact I try to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I have achieved acceptance in my tribe. When my brain begins thinking something that generates a sense of high status within the tribe, I stop thinking that thought.
----
https://jdpressman.com/2023/08/28/agi-ruin-and-the-road-to-iconoclasm.html
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould
-> there comes a point in self-deception where it becomes morally indistinguishable from lying. Consistently self-serving scientific "error", in the face of repeated correction and without informing others of the criticism, blends over into scientific fraud.
-
https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6309037/eliezer-yudkowsky/
> "I expected to be a tiny voice shouting into the void, and people listened instead. So I doubled down on that."
Weird tribalist praise for Scott: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/GMCs73dCPTL8dWYGq/use-normal-predictions/comment/ez8xrquaXmmvbsYPi
-https://hpmor.com/chapter/97
-> "Or tricks," Harry said evenly. "Statements which are technically true but which deceive the listener into forming further beliefs which are false. I think it's worth making that distinction.
-
-https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards/comment/TcsXh44pB9xRziGgt
-> A bunch of people we respected and worked with had decided the world was going to end, very soon, uncomfortably soon, and they were making it extremely difficult for us to check their work.
-
-------
I like to imagine that they have a saying out of dath ilan: once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; _three times is hostile optimization_.
But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard (["important things [...] would be all the things I've read [...] from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he"'"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228)), the "playing on a different chessboard, no harm intended" excuse loses its credibility. The turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio! (That is, I'm more likely to observe a turd on c3 in worlds where Yudkowsky _is_ playing my chessboard and wants me to lose, than in world where he's playing on a different chessboard and just _happened_ to take a shit there, by coincidence.)
-(The authors of the [HEXACO personality model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEXACO_model_of_personality_structure) may have gotten something importantly right in [grouping "honesty" and "humility" as a single factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-humility_factor_of_the_HEXACO_model_of_personality).)
+
------
I'm not, overall, satisfied with the political impact of my writing on this blog. One could imagine someone who shared Yudkowsky's apparent disbelief in public reason advising me that my practice of carefully explaining at length what I believe and why, has been an ineffective strategy—that I should instead clarify to myself what policy goal I'm trying to acheive, and try to figure out some clever gambit to play trans activists and gender-critical feminists against each other in a way that advances my agenda.
From my perspective, such advice would be missing the point. [I'm not trying to force though some particular policy.](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/) Rather, I think I know some things about the world, things I wish I had someone had told me earlier. So I'm trying to tell others, to help them live in a world that makes sense.
+
+-------
+
+I don't, actually, expect people to spontaneously blurt out everything they believe to be true, that Stalin would find offensive. "No comment" would be fine. Even selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such would be fine.
+
+-----
+
+Michael said that we didn't want to police Eliezer's behavior, but just note that something had seemingly changed and move on. "There are a lot of people who can be usefully informed about the change," Michael said. "Not him though."
+
+That was the part I couldn't understand, the part I couldn't accept.
+
+The man rewrote had rewritten my personality over the internet. Everything I do, I learned from him. He couldn't be so dense as to not even see the thing we'd been trying to point at. Like, even if he were ultimately to endorse his current strategy, he should do it on purpose rather than on accident!
+
+(Scott mostly saw it, and had [filed his honorable-discharge paperwork](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). Anna definitely saw it, and she was doing it on purpose.)
+
+-----
+
+https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kuqgJDPF6nfscSZsZ/thread-for-discussing-bostrom-s-email-and-apology?commentId=Z7kyiPAfmtztueFFJ
+
+----
+
+"there just wasn't any reliable similarity between biology and AI" is an interesting contrast with the constant use of the evolution analogy despite credible challenges
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1738464784931025333
+
+-----
+
+What if, in addition to physical punishments and Detect Thoughts, Cheliax also had Adjust Thoughts, a "gradient descent for the brain" spell (given a desired behavior, nudge the spell target's psychology to be more likely to emit that behavior)? Does Carissa still have a winning strategy? Assume whatever implementation details make for a good story. (Maybe Cheliax is reluctant to use Adjust Thoughts too much because Asmodeus wants authentic tyrannized humans, and the Adjust Thoughts sculpting makes them less tyrannized?)
+
+> One thing is sure, the path that leads to sanity and survival doesn't start with lies or with reasoning by Appeal to (Internal) Consequences.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1743522277835333865
+
+> To clarify a possibly misunderstood point: On my model, dath ilan's institutions only work because they're inhabited by dath ilani. Dath ilani invent good institutions even if they grow up in Earth; Governance on Earth lasts three days before Earth voters screw it up.
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1565516610286211072
+
+July 2023
+https://twitter.com/pawnofcthulhu/status/1680840089285582848
+> man i feel like the orthodox viewpoint on this has moved on from "let's define trans women as women" to like
+> "arguing about metaphysics is boring; letting people chose pronouns as part of self-expression seems like a thing a free society should allow for the same reason we should let people choose clothes; for many social purposes trans women are in fact empirically women"
+
+(If your "moderately serious" plan for survival is ["AI research journals banned, people violating that ban hunted down with partial effectiveness"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1739705063768232070), that might be your least-bad option as a consequentialist, but one of the things your consequentialist calculation should take into account is that you've declared war on people who want to do AI science on Earth.)
+
+public intellectual death
+https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
+
+> "Racism" is so commonly used weirdly that I think there are few circumstances left where I'd try to use the word to communicate. Instead I'd say, "X seems to be judging people negatively in a hard-to-shake-off way based on their skin color."
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1755624226550387013
+
+> "Study science, not just me!" is probably the most important piece of advice Ayn Rand should've given her followers and didn't. There's no one human being who ever lived, whose shoulders were broad enough to bear all the weight of a true science with many contributors.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/96TBXaHwLbFyeAxrg/guardians-of-ayn-rand
+
+He's still dunking instead of engaging—
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1760701916739194949
+> Every time I've raised an inscrutable alien baby to hyperintelligence by giving it shots of heroin whenever it correctly predicts the exact next word spoken by fictional good characters, it's learned to be a genuinely good person inside!
+
+
+-----
+
+> I recently advised somebody to distinguish firmly in her mind between "X is actually true" and "X is the politic thing to say"; I advised drawing a great line and the creation of separate mental buckets. The words you write, taken at face value, seem to be missing some...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493665988829186
+> ...similar distinctions. There's a distinction between honesty in the form of blurting out the whole truth, and honesty in the form of not uttering lies, and a related thing that's not making public confusions *worse* even if you aren't trying to unravel them. There's...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493883094441984
+> ...being honest in the privacy of your own mind, and being honest with your friends, and being honest in public on the Internet, and even if these things are not perfectly uncorrelated, they are also not the same. Seeking truth is the first one. It's strange and disingenuous...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494097511370752
+> ...to pretend that the master truthseekers of any age of history, must all have been blurting out everything they knew in public, at all times, on pain of not possibly being able to retain their Art otherwise. I doubt Richard Feynman was like that. More likely is that, say, ...
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494399945854976
+> ...he tried to avoid telling outright lies or making public confusions worse, but mainly got by on having a much-sharper-than-average dividing line in his mine between peer pressure against saying something, and that thing being *false*. That's definitely most of how I do it.
+
+-----
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1076155800144363520
+> I got a lot further as an adolescent on "Ask what a superintelligence would think". Eventually I used that up and have now moved on to "What would Anna Salamon think?"
+
+https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1766115590429618347
+> Please note that this is extremely, extremely true, and if you follow that to its logical conclusion, certain blogs are on the org chart of e.g. the U.S. in the same haha but absolutely serious way the NYT editorial page is.
+(quote-Tweeting someone noting Demis Hassabis linking to Slate Star Codex)
+
+----
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1766144388890243108
+> Some social media company finally went and added easy phone calls to Congress. Personally, I was a little "how noneliezeran!" that Google didn't do this way earlier, or Uber under Travis. But I can see how this would be too scary in the USA, such that China did it first.
+
+This is kind of scummy behavior! Interesting that he calls scummy consequentialism eliezerian
+
+-----
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1767276710041686076
+> What about optimising for finding and error-correcting invalid arguments?
+
+> In my own experience those are the same mental skill, but perhaps your mileage varies. But at any rate, sure.
+
+https://discord.com/channels/401181628015050773/458419017602826260/1212913739196669963
+
+-------
+
+Unfortunately, there's still some remaining tension here insofar as the guy continues to lean on "you gotta trust me, bro; I'm from dath ilan and therefore racially superior to you" personality-cult-leader intimidation tactics, which I consider myself to have a selfish interest in showing to third parties to be unfounded.
+
+With anyone else in the world, I'm happy to let an argument drop after it's been stalemated at 20K words, because no one else in the world is making a morally fraudulent claim to be a general-purpose epistemic authority that has a shot at fooling people like me. (_E.g._, Scott Alexander is very explicit about just being a guy with a blog; Scott does not actively try to discourage people from thinking for themselves.)
+
+New example from today: a claim that MIRI is constrained by the need to hire people who make only valid arguments, and (in response to a commenter) that in his experience, finding and error-correcting invalid arguments is the same mental skill. <https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1767276710041686076>
+
+But elsewhere, this _motherfucker_ has been completely shameless about refusing to acknowledge counterarguments that would be politically inconvenient for him to acknowledge!
+
+[]
+
+(Screenshot took place in a publicly-linked server and is therefore OK to share)
+
+My heart racing, it's tempting to leave a Twitter reply saying, "Actually, in my exhaustively documented experience, you don't give a shit about error-correcting invalid arguments when that would be politically inconvenient for you"
+
+But ... what good would that do, at this point? As I wrote in the memoir, "We've already seen from his behavior that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity. Why would that change?"
+
+The function of getting the Whole Dumb Story written down that I was supposed to _move on_. I have _other things to do_.
+
+---------
+
+ Oli Habryka gets it! (<https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/juZ8ugdNqMrbX7x2J/challenges-to-yudkowsky-s-pronoun-reform-proposal/comment/he8dztSuBBuxNRMSY>)
+ Vaniver gets it! (<https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/yFZH2sBsmmqgWm4Sp/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/comment/dSiBGRGziEffJqN2B>)
+
+Eliezer Yudkowsky either doesn't get it, or is pretending not to get it. I almost suspect it's the first one, which is far worse
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CpvyhFy9WvCNsifkY/discussion-with-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-agi-interventions
+> Various people who work or worked for MIRI came up with some actually-useful notions here and there, like Jessica Taylor's expected utility quantilization.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1301958048911560704
+> That is: they had to impose a (new) quantitative form of "conservatism" in my terminology, producing only results similar (low KL divergence) to things already seen, in order to get human-valued output. They didn't directly optimize for the learned reward function!
+
+-----
+
+Metzger is being reasonable here
+
+https://twitter.com/perrymetzger/status/1773340617671667713
+> That's a fairly inaccurate way of putting it. It wasn't "poked with a stick", what happened was that gradient descent was used to create a function approximator that came as close as possible to matching the inputs and outputs. It's not like someone beat a conscious entity until it deceptively did what its masters demanded but it secretly wants to do something else; in fact, the process didn't even involve GPT-4 itself, it was the process that *created* the weights of GPT-4.
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1433206619135823878
+> I don't know if that quite answers your question - but my answer to a lot of "Well, what about *this* kind of AI?" is "Well, what about it? What does one do with that kind of AI, that stops the world from ending 6 months later when some other kind of AI builds nanotech?"
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1433207431627042819
+> For concreteness: One can see how AlphaFold 2 is working up towards world-ending capability. If you ask how you could integrate an AF2 setup with GPT-3 style human imitation, to embody the human desire for proteins that do nice things... the answer is roughly "Lol, what? No."
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1775233618035736819
+(in response to Jessica saying that LLM pretraining favors short term)
+> True for now, at least.
+
+He didn't already know this from the discussion when the Sleeper Agents paper came out?
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1778938096123359256
+
+https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1726860200421085589
+> i was on a 3-month trial for this position, and the terms of the trial were: i would not, at any point, get to field an actual question from the researchers, because all of their actual questions were *too sensitive* for me to know about
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff